Story Structure: Character Desire

Kurt Vonnegut famously advised writers: Characters must want something, even if it’s just a glass of water.

Desire is what the character thinks they want. According to Vonnegut, this could be something run-of-the-mill. But maybe that character who wants a glass of water really needs human interaction, which is why he has visited the corner shop to buy a bottle of water rather than drinking it out of his kitchen tap. This advice is so fundamental, every storytelling guru will tell you a version of the same thing.

Some authors don’t bother with such low stakes as a glass of water. Before Caroline Leavitt starts any novel, she asks herself the following questions about each of her characters.

What does she want at the beginning of the novel and why? And what’s at stake if she doesn’t get it? “There has to be something at stake. It has to be something really major. I mean, if she just wants a glass of water, that’s not really interesting.”

Note that ‘stakes’ is a concept closely related to ‘desire’. John Yorke prefers the term ‘active goal’ rather than ‘desire’:

All archetypal stories are defined by this one essential tenet: the central character has an active goal. They desire something. If characters don’t then it’s almost impossible to care for them, and care we must. They are our avatars and thus our entry point: they are the ones we most want to win or to find redemption — or indeed be punished if they’ve transgressed, for subconsciously we can be deeply masochistic in our desires. Effectively they’re us. […] If a character doesn’t want something, they’re passive. And if they’re passive, they’re effectively dead. Without a desire to animate the protagonist, the writer has no hope of bringing the character alive, no hope of telling a story and the work will almost always be boring. — John Yorke, Into The Woods

And for the concept of desire itself, some people use different terminology: motive, goal, want. Each genre of story has its own typical desire lines. In romantic comedies the main character wants to find love. In a crime thriller the detective wants to find the criminal. The ‘quest’ plot has a strong desire line built into its plot, which partly explains its enduring popularity over the last 3000 years. John Truby has given us a basic hierarchy of desire, which shows us the complete continuum of wants. As you can see, superheroes are at the top, underdogs are at the bottom. From highest level of desire to lowest:

Save the world

Save the republic

Bright justice and freedom

Gain Love

Find the truth

Catch a criminal

Explore a world

Achieve something

Win the battle

Take revenge

Survive or escape

We might quibble a little with the ordering of that list — some characters (and people) make it their absolute mission in life to exact revenge. But the takeaway point is this: Your main character doesn’t have to want to save the world in order for you to have a decent story in your hands.

Desire is the main reason almost all TV shows are set in the cop, lawyer, and doctor arenas. These jobs give their shows a simple and repeatable desire line that tracks the episode every week. Catch the criminal. Win the case. Save the life. But of course this is extremely limiting. Most people don’t spend their daily lives solving crimes, prosecuting bad guys, and saving lives.

— John Truby

Without desire, no story. This is so basic — at first glance what more could be to it? This comic strip by Poorly Drawn Lines takes a common desire line and spoofs it. Why does it work as a joke? Because of the juxtaposition between (noble) quest and the completely unremarkable character arc — the discovery that he can eat his roommate’s leftovers with basically no consequences. This flaunts the basic rules of storytelling which we all know intuitively: When a character has a strong desire they go on an important quest and undergo significant character change as a result. Achieving their goal must be hard. It can’t come easily or you don’t have a fully-fleshed story. So everyone knows this — everyone gets the joke in that comic — but when you sit down to write your actual story you may find yourself wrestling with the following:

Your character did want something, but now they’ve got it and your story doesn’t feel long enough, or quite finished.

You might know what your character wants, but what if they don’t? What if you need your character to be lacking in self-awareness?

WEAKNESS AND ITS LINK TO DESIRE

Your character’s weakness is linked to their desire. (Click through on that link for a whole lot more.) Here’s how desire and weakness are linked, and why you should be clear by the time you start your second draft what these are for your characters:

A story only becomes interesting to the audience after the desire comes into play.

Desire drives the story.

Desire is intimately connected to need. In most stories, when the hero accomplishes their goal, they also fulfil their need.

Need has to do with overcoming a weakness within the character.

Desire is a goal outside the character.

Need and desire have different functions in relation to the audience. Need lets the audience see how the hero must change to have a better life, but it remains hidden, under the surface.

Desire gives the audience something to want along with the hero. Desire is on the surface and is what the audience thinks the story is about.

— John Truby from his screenwriting book, Anatomy of Story

ESTABLISHMENT OF DESIRE EQUALS BEGINNING OF STORY

A story doesn’t become interesting to the audience until the desire comes into play…Desire is the driving force in the story. — John Truby

DESIRE BECOMES CLEAR AT THE INCITING INCIDENT

If you think of story structure in terms of ‘inciting incidents’, the main character’s desire becomes clear to the main character and to the audience after the inciting incident. That’s what the inciting incident is for. A specific type of inciting incident is Hitchcock’s ‘McGuffin’. This is an inciting incident which the audience has completely forgotten about by story’s end. The best inciting incidents subvert readers’ expectations. Inciting incidents aren’t always so easy to pick as an ‘explosion which rocks the main character’s world’. It can be much more subtle.

The protagonist will be alerted to a world outside their own.

They will make a decision on how to react to this and pursue a course of action that will precipitate a crisis.

This will force them to make a decision propelling them into a whole new universe.

FULFILMENT OF DESIRE EQUALS END OF STORY

Joss [Whedon] makes his living denying people what they want.

— James Marsters

Whedon seems to live by advice as explained by Karl Iglesias:

A scene with a chase-and-capture dynamic (the character achieves their scene objective) or a chase-and-escape (they don’t get what they want). A balanced plot line will often include scenes that alternate between the two. Once the writer establishes the central question of whether the protagonist will accomplish their goal, the scenes that answer, “Yes they will!” in a small scene victory should alternate with “No they won’t” in a defeat, back and forth. This alternates the potent visceral emotions of hope and worry. Because a scene is like a mini-story, its beats can also alternate between satisfaction whenever the central character gets a step closer to getting what he wants, and frustration whenever there’s a setback, creating a dance between hope and worry within one scene, and thus keeping the reader hooked.

— Karl Iglesias, Writing For Emotional Impact

Likewise, when your character has got what they want, your story is over. (Or maybe your main character does not get what they want, in which case you’ve written a tragedy.) If they get what they want ‘halfway through’ your novel, avoid trying to fix that problem by giving them a new desire. New desire means a new story.

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”

— George Bernard Shaw (Both work irl; only the first applies if it’s fiction.)

However! Desire mutates. Desire strengthens. In fact, in many, many films you’ll see a passive underdog main character drawn unwillingly into adventure but at the halfway point (and yes, it’s usually exactly the midpoint) they’ll ‘double down’. Now they really, really want that thing they were meh about at the beginning. Desire does not change over the course of a single story. Your main character has one main desire, they go to the ends of the earth to get it (or not) and then the story is over. Contrast this with ‘character plans‘. Plans change all the time. Initial plans fail and characters must invent increasingly ingenious ways to overcome opponents. But the desire line? That’s why I like the phrase ‘desire line’ — that is a single arrow which takes an audience all the way from beginning to end. I do like to quote John Truby because he has goes deeply into what it really means to create a character with a desire. Desire is closely related to ‘need’.

As you can see, Truby thinks of desire in terms of a double layer — one on the surface, the other underneath. Others think in terms of three layers. Dostoevskian character has at least three layers, writes James Wood in How Fiction Works:

BOTTOM LAYER: Can only be understood religiously. These characters act like this because they want to be known; even if they are unaware of it, they want to reveal their baseness. They want to confess. They want to reveal the dark shamefulness of their souls. They act scandalously and appallingly without quite knowing why.

(This all explains why Freud and Nietzche were attracted to Dostoevsky’s work.)

CHARACTERS WHO DON’T WANT ANYTHING

These people exist in real life, right? So they also need to exist in fiction. Indeed they do. A lot of coming-of-age stories are about teenagers mooching around, for instance. A good example is Greg from Me, Earl and the Dying Girl. These characters are defined by what they don’t want rather than what they do want.

Megan McDonald’s Judy Moody title is hyperbolic — preadolescent Judy Moody is interested in her own community.

ACTIVELY PASSIVE CHARACTERS

What if your character is not a cop or a surgeon or a hero? What if they want to sit on the couch? If you have a passive main character (and by ‘main character’ I mean ‘the character we see the most’), make them actively passive. That’s key. Things are happening around them. Other characters must have strong desires. Even to maintain their status quo, your main character must go out of their way to maintain it.

CHARACTERS WHO HAVE CONFLICTING DESIRES

This isn’t a problem in your storytelling because a story starring character with two conflicting desires is a story about… conflict! And conflict is good for storytelling. Also, people are walking contradictions. We all want conflicting things. In his book What Makes Us Tick? Hugh Mackay talks about our conflicting desire for homeostasis and predictability which rubs up against our need for constant change. He also points out that we can want something badly, but as soon as we get it, we wonder why we craved it in the first place. The question is: why? Is it that we know, deep within us, that if we don’t change we will wither and die, intellectually and emotionally, if not actually? Or is it that we crave change more than we care to admit; that we love surprises and challenges because they bring us to life and force a reaction from us? Yet the very notion of upheaval is at war with our apparently sincere wish for stability and stasis. Just as the homeostatic mechanisms of the body automatically adjust for tilt or for temperature change (making us shiver to warm up or sweat to cool down), we imagine that we automatically seek that kind of emotional stability, too. Who wants to be shocked by an unwelcome turn of events? Who wants to be obliged to change their minds?

Perhaps this tension between our intellectual need for surprise and uncertainty and our emotional need for security and stability accounts for the restlessness of the human spirit documented by poets, philosophers, theologians and psychologists. It often feels as if we desire one thing and desire its opposite.

— Hugh Mackay, What Makes Us Tick

Of course this bundle of conflicting desires will be reflected in fiction, and indeed makes for the most interesting kind of fiction.

FEMINISM AND GOALS

Female characters sometimes seem passive but in fact they are limited by the storyworld, not permitted to pursue a goal even if they have one. ‘Goals’ as necessary elements of fiction are therefore a feminist issue.

In my education as a TV writer, I heard the same advice on repeat: your protagonist must drive through a story in the relentless pursuit of a goal. This gold standard of storytelling exists for good reason. Stick to it and your story will be clear, your main character a hero, and your narrative comfortable and familiar enough for people to invest in emotionally. In other words, something must happen externally. They have to be forced into action, even if it’s in a vain attempt to keep everything exactly the same as it was before. Often in realistic fiction it’s the annoying mother or a teacher on their tail. In a fantasy/thriller there’s a much wider range of villains who can enter the story to turn a character’s life upside down. … She is limited, and the audience is made to feel this limitation. Women are not often allowed to manipulate this sacred storytelling framework in television. Men, and male-centered narratives, have dominated the small screen from the early days of three-camera sitcoms, right through to what’s now being dubbed as The Golden Age of TV. These narratives privilege a quintessentially male experience. An experience where you get to do what you want, when you want, mostly free from systems that control your movements and decisions. The ideal of the active protagonist assumes your main character is free to act. But it’s hard to venture forth when the deck is stacked against you.

— Courtney Jane Walker, What Makes Alias Grace So Good

Cynthia Benis Abrams hosts a podcast called Advanced TV Herstory. The episode from March 22 2018 is about a new kind of aimless character. In TV series, female characters can be divided into categories according to what they want:

Wants to get married

Wants to dedicate self to family

Working mother, often single

Retired woman (these are few — standout example is The Golden Girls)

Feminerd — great at her job, not so lucky in love. Wants it all. (The Mindy Project, New Girl)

The woman who isn’t sure what she wants out of life. This character let’s life happen to her. She spends her time responding to external events.

This sixth category is especially interesting from the writing and desire line point of view. Why does this character find popularity and what gave rise to her? First of all, the woman who doesn’t know what she wants is limited to the cable networks. The big, public networks aren’t taking risks on this kind of aimless woman, yet. This indicates she’s still pretty niche. Look at the following examples and you’ll know people who can’t stand these shows, indicating their niche-ness:

Piper Chapman in Orange Is The New Black. (I can’t bear this character myself — she’s the weak link in the entire cast.)

Jessa from Girls, who starts out as a party girl. She marries but it doesn’t last. She has no clear goals throughout most of the series, but she does find herself later on, lending a sense of conclusion to the series.

Chloe from Don’t Trust the B**** in Apartment B.

There is one example from an earlier era. The Days and Nights Of Molly Dodd ran from 1987-1991 and stars a woman who is reactive rather than proactive. She is roll-over nice but isn’t the go-getter audiences had gotten used to after second wave feminism of the 1970s. This woman is a new trope, specific (mostly) to the 2010s. This probably reflects the dominant American culture, in which millennial women can have two postgraduate degrees from an Ivy League and still find themselves under- or unemployed. Young women no longer believe that it’s possible to have it all. Their grandmothers (or mothers) were the first to have a choice between family and career or both. I come from an in-between generation where there was never any doubt that family and career can go hand-in-hand, but with rising student debt and house prices, millennial women are realising kids might be impossible, even if they want a family. The sit-com Friends is perhaps the bridge between those second wave feminist women and the Piper Chapman/New Girl trope.

Season One of Friends is a great one, for a sitcom. It’s not a great season for Friends, by a mile. The show would soon find its footing with more serialized storylines, and the cast would only get better with time. Even so, the early episodes did a great job of introducing us to the gang and making us want to hang out with them again. The plot would thicken up nicely, but at first it was simple. Twenty-somethings navigating the usual travails of young-ish adulthood, most of which can conceivably be worked out in 22-minutes: Rachel can’t do laundry, so Ross teaches her how. Joey and Chandler’s crappy kitchen table breaks, so they buy a new one—a foosball table! The girls have a moment of existential dread, realizing that youth is past and life is chaotic and they “don’t even have a pla,” let alone a plan. So, they get drunk, problem solved.

I haven’t looked into TV’s aimless men, but that would be interesting to compare. Brett and Jemaine from Flight of the Conchords are fairly aimless, but their backseat goal is to get gigs. They are just as easily sidetracked by getting jobs as sandwich boards or making helmet hair. I’m not sure if this counts as ‘aimless’, or if it’s more accurate to say their aims are comically trivial.

WHEN CHARACTERS DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY WANT

The female sit-com characters above demonstrate that a story can be successful even when they are basically aimless. Neil Gaiman probably also agrees with this facet of human psychology, in which even characters who think they know what they want don’t really:

“I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean anything? What then?”

— Neil Gaiman, Coraline, p112

Part of the interest of a character is seeing them come to an understanding of what they want:

A teenager wants to stay out all night and party past curfew but what they really (also) want (need) is to show their parents that they are grown now, and don’t need to live life by their parents’ rules.

A toddler wants to eat ice cream instead of broccoli, but also wants/needs to show their parents they are the boss of what goes into their mouth.

A future king wants to overcome his stuttering in order to give a speech but wants/needs to prove to himself, his family and the public that he is up to a leadership role.

The most interesting goals will be an outworking of the main character’s deep-seated desire. Greg from Me, Earl and the Dying Girl wants love and wants to be accepted, which is precisely why he has made it his mission to cheer up the dying girl.

WHEN WRITERS DON’T KNOW WHAT THEIR CHARACTERS WANT

Just as we often have conflicting desires, it is very common for us to not really know what we want. In narrative, this isn’t very satisfying though. Plenty of characters don’t know what they want. That’s why they’re sitting around waiting for life to happen to them. But in a story, at some point they must either realise what it is they desire (based on psychological need) or not, in which case this will be their downfall. We all want many things. Janis Joplin wants a Mercedes Benz, a colour TV, and a night on the town. That’s just the surface desire, by the way. What she really wants is to be valued as much as her friends are.

ONE DESIRE PER STORY

The Desire must be specific to this particular story. It’s not enough for a character to want ‘love’ or ‘acceptance’. These things will of course be true, but alongside these nebulous, generalised deep-seated desires there must be another one far more targeted. For instance, “to cheer up a girl who is dying and make her a short film as tribute”. The more concrete the desire the easier it is to write the story. The easiest stories to create can be held in the main character’s hand (or not, if it’s a tragedy). Searching for something, getting something, returning something — these kinds of stories might be called ‘grail quests’.

CHARACTER DESIRE AND WOMEN

Most of the storytelling gurus work for screenwriters and are men. I would like to add to the discussion: Female characters, in fiction as in real life, will attract audience criticism for expressing certain desires and it’s important for writers to understand this basic gender difference sexism when creating a story. Jill Soloway (non-binary) is one of the big name California writers, and has this to say about women and desire as it relates to their experience directing in the macho world of Hollywood:

“Women are shamed for having desire for anything – for food, for sex, for anything. We’re asked to only be the object for other people’s desire. There’s nothing that directing is about more than desire. It’s like, ‘I want to see this. I want to see it with this person. I want to change it. I want to change it again.’ It’s like directing is female desire over and over again, and film is the capturing of human emotions and somehow men were able to swindle us into believing that that is their specialty. All they told us our whole life is we’re too emotional to do any real jobs, yet they’ve taken the most emotional job, which is art making about human emotions and said we’re not capable of it.

Jill Soloway recently adapted I Love Dick for TV — a story which is in its entirety about the most taboo female desires.

“I don’t care how you see me, I don’t care if you want me. It’s better that you don’t. It’s enough that I want you.”

— the main female character to an imaginary male object of desire

If characters must have desire in order to be interesting and, as Jill Soloway has noticed, women aren’t permitted desire in the dominant culture, it follows that any female characters are likely to be less interesting than male characters, relegated to supporting roles and turned into objects. There are many, many examples, but here’s one:

It’s rare to see any film, much less a PG-13 one for broad audiences, present a woman as a sex object as blatant as Lady Lisa, a fantasy who falls into a man’s arms without so much as a word – from review of Pixels in Vanity Fair. Pixels was released in 2015.

Jill Soloway’s I Love Dick is a response to this long history of storytelling. Perhaps there are some desires which are more specific to women. Jane Caro mentions Hugh McKay’s book What Makes Us Tick in this article, in which Caro expands her definition of feminism to mean, basically: The desire to be taken seriously.

DESIRE AND CHARACTER EMPATHY

In fiction there’s a surefire way to set up the villain of the piece: The villain is the one who wants money and power. Especially power.

THE ROLE OF ALLIES

Once your character has her desire line, she’ll generally need some allies to help her with her goal. In film, the allies will also function as sounding boards, though this shouldn’t be their only function. Use this ally to define your main character. Never make the ally a more interesting character than the main character. The story should be about your most interesting character.

— notes from John Truby, The Anatomy Of Storytelling

THE ROLE OF OPPONENTS

The very definition of an opponent: The character who stands in the way of your character getting what they want.

Somebody’s got to want something, something’s got to be standing in their way of getting it. You do that and you’ll have a scene.

— Aaron Sorkin

DESIRE AND WRITING SCENES

This is a tip from Karl Iglesias in Writing For Emotional Impact. In each scene, the lead character of that scene will have a desire. If sketching out a story plan, Iglesias advises phrasing that character’s desire in relation to that person’s opponents in the scene:

NOT: Spongebob goes to the Krabby Patty hoping to get a job. INSTEAD: Spongebob goes to the Krabby Patty to persuade Mr Krabs and Squidward to give him a job.

The reason for doing so? To remind yourself that every dramatic scene requires conflict of desires. (For more on Spongebob, see this post.)

GENRE AND DESIRE

Each genre has its own desire line tropes.

Romance

For instance, in romance the reader knows that the main character wants to find love. Though what they really want is to find wholeness, and themselves reflected in another individual.

There are countless reasons to read romance novels and much to love about the genre. But ten months into my journey as a newbie romance reader, I’ve finally realized what I personally love so deeply and completely about romance: I always know what the character wants, and I know they’re going to get it. […] Characters in romance novels can be just as deep and nuanced as any other characters in fiction. They can want complicated or contradictory things; they can make mistakes; they can spend a hundred pages pining over the wrong person before finally realizing that it’s someone else who will make them happy. But unlike other kinds of fiction, the underlying current of desire, the thing that drives the plot, the mechanism that makes you turn pages—is never, ever a surprise.

CHARACTER DESIRE IN CHILDREN’S STORIES

It’s a well-known dictum of Disney that their animated movie musicals must start with an “I Wish” song in which the protagonist declares their deepest desire, the one that will be fulfilled by the end of the movie.

MIDDLE GRADE NOVELS

THE MAGICIAN’S ELEPHANT BY KATE DICAMILLO

DiCamillo conveys the main character’s (Peter’s) desire by having him visit a fortune teller at a marketplace. This is a nice way of introducing desire, because it ‘shows’ rather than needing the unseen narrator to spell it out. DiCamillo is also a little tricky about how she reveals Peter’s desire — the masterful thing she does here is making the reader wonder what it is that Peter needs to know. DiCamillo understands that the reader needs to know what Peter wants, and she withholds this information for a few pages in order to create suspense. He put the coin in his pocket. He took the soldier’s hat off his head and then put it back on. He stepped away from the [fortune teller’s] sign and came back to it, and stood considering, again, the outrageous and wonderful words.

“But I must know,” he said at last. He took the florit from his pocket. “I want to know the truth. And so I will do it.” [several pages later] Peter felt a small stab of fear. What if, after all this time, he did not really want to know? “Speak,” said the fortune-teller. “Ask.” “My parents,” said Peter. “That is your question?” said the fortune teller. “They are dead.” Peter’s hands trembled. “That is not my question,” he said. “I know that already. You must tell me something that I do not know. You must tell me of another–you must tell me…” The fortune-teller narrowed her eyes. “Ah,” she said. “Her? Your sister? That is your question? Very well. She lives.” Peter’s heart seized upon the words. She lives. She lives!

In this way, the reader can guess already, after only four pages of story plus one full-page illustration, that Peter desires to find his lost sister. Several lines later, in case the young reader missed it:

“If she lives, then I must find her; so my question is, how do I make my way there, to where she is?”

The reader wants Peter to find his sister and will now follow him on his journey through this intriguing world full of magical realism. When we first meet Peter he is struggling internally with a moral dilemma: Should he spend the coin on food, as instructed by an adult in a position of authority, or does he use it to possibly find out about his lost sister? Peter doesn’t know which adult to believe. Does he believe his soldier-caregiver who says his sister is dead, or does he believe a disinterested but shady fortune-teller who says his sister is alive? Peter’s main weakness at the beginning of the story is that he is looking to adults to know what to believe. Over the course of the story he must mature by relying upon his own inner compass. Until he learns to trust in himself, he won’t be able to lead a good life, because other people don’t have his best interests at heart.

GINGER PYE BY ELEANOR ESTES

In this classic story, the desire of main characters Jerry and Rachel changes over the course of the book, from wanting a dog of their own, to wanting their beloved dog back after he is stolen. The desire is established as soon as the book opens:

Would Gracie-the-cat be jealous if the Pyes got another pet — a dog? That was what Jerry Pye wanted to know and what he was dreaming about as he sat with Rachel, his sister, on their little upstairs veranda.

In case the young reader has missed it, the second paragraph opens with:

The one thing that Jerry Pye wanted more than anything else in the world right now was a dog. Ever since he had seen the new puppies over in Speedys’ barn, he was not only more anxious than ever to have a dog, he was most anxious to have one of these Speedy puppies.

There are 14 chapters in this book. The first desire is met in chapter two when Jerry and Rachel earn a dollar and are able to buy the dog they want. This might mean the end of the story, unless something else happens: the book turns into a crime story/mystery when they feel they’re being followed by a ‘mysterious footstepper’, and the dog goes missing in chapter 7. The following 6 chapters detail the lengths Jerry and Rachel go to in looking for their dog. Naturally, the dog is found in chapter 14, and there the story ends, because order has been restored. The main problem Jerry and Rachel have is that they

Are too trusting of people who shouldn’t be trusted

They jump to conclusions, making them terrible amateur detectives.

The adults in their lives also suffer from these character flaws, which one could argue are strengths as much as they are flaws. They trust Wally Bullwinkle, who has stolen the dog, because they get it into their heads that the dog thief is your archetypal criminal — a grown man. Yet they jump to this conclusion with no proof whatsoever, and even draw a sketch for the local policeman, who is influenced thusly. By the end of the story they have discovered the truth of what happened, and are berated by the local policeman for drawing a misleading sketch. They have presumably learnt a lesson about making up stories:

[The Chief of Police] came by just then, having had his buns and coffee at last, to make a report on latest developments. […] “The young-uns threw me off the track with that picture they drewed of the man.” “We thought Wally Bullwinkle was just a boy in my class,” explained Jerry apologetically, for now it seemed as though , from the beginning, it should have been as plain as the nose on his face that Wally had been the thief. “We didn’t know Wally was a thief and he didn’t look like the picture we drew of the unsavory character. We didn’t know an unsavory character could be just a boy in my class,” said Jerry.

The confrontation/acknowledgement above occurs just three pages before the end of the novel. The final three pages are used to show that everyone is happy now and back to normal. Estes makes use of dramatic irony throughout Ginger Pye — the young reader will work out long before Jerry and Rachel do that Wally Bullwinkle is the dog thief. We’ve given more than enough clues. This makes the reader feel smart, and has a pedagogic effect of conveying the message that ‘bad people are everywhere; they are among the people you know’. This also means in effect that the main part of the story is the moral need of Jerry and Rachel rather than the desire to have their dog — this being a children’s book, we know this is probably going to happen (unless you’ve read Where The Red Fern Grows, in which case you might be bracing yourself for sadness…).

MILLICENT MIN, GIRL GENIUS BY LISA YEE

The main character of this book is a nerdy genius type who is starting senior high school at the tender age of eleven. Millicent’s surface desire is to be accepted in the college course she will be attending for the first time. She wants someone to sign her high school yearbook, even as she is dismissive of the hysteria end-of-school seems to inspire in others.

After a while it became clear that I wasn’t on the top (or even on the bottom) or anyone’s autograph list.

Millicent’s medium-term goal is to become valedictorian.

Maybe when I’m valedictorian my autograph will be more sought after.

The reader is also told about Millicent’s long-term goals at the end of the first chapter, but none of this exposition is really about Millicent’s desire line — rather, it’s to explain Millicent’s psychological and moral needs:

“I know exactly where I’m headed.” It’s true. I’ve mapped out my goals for the next fourteen years. “Try veering off the road now and then,” Maddie suggested as she lugged her dragon around the room. “Take a few side trips, see where you end up. You might be pleasantly surprised.” I stifled a laugh as I sipped my lemonade. Everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Why would I want to take any other route?

We learn at the beginning of chapter two that she plans to win the Fields Medal by the age of twenty, or possibly 23. We’ve also told that this medal is for high achievers under 40. We can see that Millicent may be smart, but she has no real concept of age, which places her firmly as a child (at least, in an adult reader’s mind). Millicent is not well-liked by the older students in her class, for reasons that are obvious to the reader, but not to her. The reader sees how she is accepted only by adults and fellow nerdy types. In self-centred fashion, Millie writes a list of things to do with her grandmother over summer, ignoring the possibility that her grandmother might want to do a few things on her own. In order to have a better life, Millicent needs to learn some humility and genuine wisdom. As it happens, we have been clued into her psychological and moral weaknesses in the opening paragraph, so we can expect that by the end of the novel, these traits have been somewhat ameliorated:

I have been accused of being anal retentive, an over-achiever, and a compulsive perfectionist, like those are bad things. My disposition probably has a lot to do with the fact that I am technically a genius.

Does the reader really want Millicent to become valedictorian? I actually don’t! Not without becoming a better person. The rest of the book will be about Millicent becoming a better person, treating others better and coming to grips with some of her own more disastrous quirks. This will allow plenty of room for comedy, often with Millicent as the butt of the joke.

THE BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA BY KATHERINE PATERSON

Sure enough, Jessie Oliver Aarons, Jr has a clear desire, explained to the reader at the very beginning of the story: Jesse wants to be the fastest runner in school. In the first scene, he is getting up early to train. Remember that scenes also need their own desires. Jesse’s ‘mini’ desire in the opening scene is to make it downstairs without waking anyone up, because ‘Momma would be mad as flies in a fruit jar if [he] woke her up at this time of day.’ This is one of those stories in which the reader is encouraged to feel sorry for a boy who is surrounded only by sisters. (Aside: Does the inverse story work, too, in which we feel bad for a girl because she only has brothers? Or is it more likely that she’s ‘lucky’, because she turns out a ‘tomboy’?) Basically, Jesse is lonely. This is his psychological need. Paterson subversively turns this into a feminist-friendly story by having a girl move in next door, rather than a boy. Jesse’s moral need is that he is dismissive of girls in general as companions.

Four year olds were a pure pain.

This is something he, as well as readers, have absorbed from the dominant culture — it is genuinely problematic when he is forced to wear his sister’s ‘girl’ shoes to school. But over the course of the novel Jesse learns to form a friendship with a girl despite her gender, and as a consequence he learns to appreciate his little sister May Belle more, and treat her as a companion rather than as a nuisance. Jesse also learns to embrace the parts of himself which are considered ‘feminine’ such as his love of drawing. This, too, is established early on.

Ever since he’d been in first grade he’d been that “crazy little kid that draws all the time.”

CHARACTER DESIRE IN PICTURE BOOKS

Windows are often used as a visual metaphor for desire. A character might be looking out from a window (or another high vantage point), or they may be looking in on something, unable to grasp it because of the glass.

Book cover from the children’s novel Christmas Holidays at Merryvale by Alice Hale Burnett (1916)

THE TALE OF TWO BAD MICE BY BEATRIX POTTER

One might think that the star of this story is the dollhouse itself, because the reader is introduced first to the dollhouse and only to the mice after three double spreads. This is a little unusual, but has been done with purpose: The young reader is encouraged to look lasciviously at this doll’s-house. We wish we could go in and play with it. We’re told how beautiful it is, and about all the wonderful things inside it. So naturally, when we meet Hunca Munca and Tom Thumb, we absolutely identify with their desire to go inside and play. We’re not told in the text that this is what they want to do — we feel it for ourselves. The Tale Of Two Bad Mice is a carnivalesque tale in which the childlike main characters act against the established order. This doll’s-house does not belong to the mice, so we feel they are not really supposed to be there. At the same time, we absolutely empathise with the poor creatures when their hopes are dashed. This is not a real feast at all, but a fake one! A psychological need of these mice is that they have been fooled. The moral need of the mice is that they have no control of their enthusiasms. In a frenzied effort to find the real feast and a real, liveable mansion for themselves, they steal parts of the doll’s house and cause destruction of a beautiful object which belongs to a little girl, and by proxy to two inanimate dolls.

The story has two endings — the first part of the story ends when the nurse exclaims that she will set a mouse trap. But the story can only end properly after the mice are shown to have had a character arc, in order words they must have learnt to treat others with respect. (Naturally, a story as old as this is heavily gendered.)

So that is the story of the two Bad Mice, — but they were not so very very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke. He found a crooked sixpence under the hearthrug; and upon Christmas Eve, he and Hunca Munca stuffed it into one of the stockings of Lucinda and Jane. Beatrix Potter

SPOT GOES TO THE FARM BY ERIC HILL

What about in a story for much younger readers? The surface desire of Spot is apparent from the very first image, yet it’s surprisingly complex, and is the desire of many main characters in books for adults. This is a boy who wants to prove himself a capable man to his father. In this case, he wants to prove his worth by finding the farm animals himself. I’m going to argue that this is both Spot’s surface-desire and his psychological need, rolled into one.

On the final double spread we see the words:

Did Dad show you the piglets, Spot? Yes, and then I found some kittens to show Dad!

The story ends because Spot has achieved his desire to impress his father.

Does a simple character such as Spot have a moral need? In other words, does Spot need to learn to treat others better in order to lead a better life? In this story, Spot is told to ‘hurry up’ because he’s busy looking for lambs even as he stands on the backs of a flock of sheep. He is told to get out of the pond, and presumably frightens a duck who says, ‘Quack quack!’ Spot’s main moral need is that–like any toddler character–he is too intent on making fun and achieving the goal at hand to see that around him others aren’t quite so enthusiastic. This can be seen throughout the Spot series. For example, when he ‘helps’ his mother to bake a cake for Dad’s birthday, the reader can see (though Spot himself cannot) that he is causing more nuisance than ‘helping’.

But in a picture book such as this, does the character come face to face with his own moral need? The answer is no, and part of the reason is because this is a series. Even in books which are not technically part of a series, they should be treated as part of a wider literature, in which characters like Spot (and Charlie and Lola, and Clifford, and Peppa Pig) are characters in a sit-com, never growing old, sometimes learning minor lessons along the way, but never really doing anyone else any harm.

IT’S THE BEAR! BY JEZ ALBOROUGH

Eddy’s desire and main psychological need is established at the outset:

Eddy doesn’t want to come and picnic in the woods with Mum. “I’m scared,” he said, “about the bear, the great big bear that lives in there.” Jez Alborough

Here we have a story about what the main character doesn’t want to do. Presumably, he desires to be anywhere but here, eating his picnic in safety.

In the real world, this psychological need is a real impediment, and fear of impossible things is something the target audience is likely to be struggling with: monsters under the bed, ghosts in the wardrobe… This is the stuff of childhood, and also the stuff of picture books, where we find many a main character whose main job is to avoid whatever scary things reside in his/her head.

Does Eddy have a moral need? Well, the mother most certainly has a moral need. She needs to learn to listen to her son, because apparently he is right about massive bears found lurking in woods. So is this an ensemble story, with two main characters? No, the main character is most definitely Eddy.

Look a little closer and you’ll see that Eddy does indeed have a moral need: He needs to stop judging large bears by their size. Eddy assumes that because the bear is huge then it is also dangerous. But the reader sees from the bear’s humorous delight in the tiny (to him) blueberry pie, that this bear is nothing to be afraid of. Eddy should not judge a book by its cover.

Likewise, there are many picture books in which the scary thing turns out to be real, but it turns out to be nothing to fear.